The Future of Local Government in Europe

Abstract

Local Public Sector Reforms in Europe: Core Areas of ModernizationOver recent decades, local governments in Europe have come increasingly under pressure facing a multitude of new challenges, like demographic change, climate change, public debt, digitalization, demands for more participation, and the migration crisis in some European countries, to name just a few.Consequently, a wave of political and administrative reforms aimed at coping with these challenges, pressures and, wicked problems has changed local governance in many nations.In part, these changes were the result of reform policies introduced by national and state governments, often triggered by austerity, which has become an overwhelming reality for an increasing number of European municipalities.They also followed municipal initiatives and more endogenous driving forces.At the same time, current demands on and future expectations of local governments are high and still growing: municipalities and counties are not only responsible for efficient administration, high-quality services and a legally correct execution of laws coming from the upper levels of government, but also for ensuring legitimacy, democratic participation, accountability and trust -often under the conditions of austerity.Obviously, a certain degree of autonomy is needed in order to put local governments in a position to meet all these demands.This policy brochure draws scientific conclusions from the comparative study of reforms in 31 countries, including not only Continental European, Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries, but also Central Eastern and South Eastern European countries.As the policy brief is entitled 'Future of Local Government in Europe', our ambition here is not only to draw lessons from the past, but also to ask how policymakers can shape and influence the future of local governments.How should they deal with increasing challenges and how can reform decisions be adapted to various external and internal pressures?Just ignoring them does not seem to be a very convincing option.11 n

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.